Dear Abandonia visitors: We are a small team that runs one of the largest DOS Games websites in the world. We have only 3 members of staff, but serve 450,000 users and have outgoing costs like any other top site for example: our servers, power, rent, programs, and staff. Abandonia is something special. It is a library of old games for you to download. It is like an old gaming arcade with all the old games in their original format. Abandonia is a place where you can find great old games and have fun four hours and years. To protect our independence, we are dependent of our friends using the site. We run on donations averaging around 6 USD (5 Euro). If everyone reading this gave the price of a cup of coffee, our fundraiser would be made easier. If Abandonia is useful to you, take one minute to keep it online for another year. Please help us forget fundraising and get back to Abandonia.

When Abandonia was founded it was to collect and present all old games where the copyright protection had been abandoned, hence the term ’abandonware’ and the site name Abandonia.com. We are still doing our best to keep the site open and free and will appreciate your support to help it stay that way.

&dash; Thank you from the Abandonia Team

We are trying to make it easy for people in every country to donate. Please let us know how we could make it easier for you.

Text adventures: I was weaned on them when computer games were in their infancy. I played dozen upon dozen of text adventures – I used to solve them, write a fancy solution, and sell the solution for a dollar each – so I have a good knowledge of what is expected of even the most rudimentary of this genre.

The Twilight Zone, tries to capitalize on the TV series success, but you’d have to be really out there to enjoy this game. Let me say up front that I have no documentation and only played the game for about 30 minutes, before giving up in frustration. Not from the puzzles mind you, but from the quality of play. Put aside the fact that it is a text adventure, which will lose the attention of about 90% of you anyway, and consider these failures instead.

The presentation is lousy, and in a text adventure presentation is one of the few things that matter. If your game is based on a player’s need to read tons of text, you should strive to make it readable. The Twilight Zone (TZ) fails to do even that. The room descriptions are cluttered, continuous text, with nary any spacing to ease the reading. The game responses are just jammed in between the prompt, again without spacing.

Commonly expected features, even for the oldest of text adventures is shortcuts to limit the repetitive typing, such a “I” for inventory, “L” for Look, etc. Granted TZ has some of this, it seems, in that you can use “N, S, E, or W” but too little for my tastes. Thankfully “Get All” is implemented.

Normally two-word parsers are fairly good, as the limited lexicon is more easily handled. TZ doesn’t do this well either. Again, I expected “I” to dutifully spit out a list of the things I am carrying, but instead I am told “You can’t go in that direction.” So even if you are nice enough to handle the compass direction by their first letter, you would thing the parser would be smart enough to then recognize that not all single letter commands are direction.

OK, enough of that. TZ is a little wacky, as one would expect, as it randomly plays a snippet of the Twilight Zone theme. There doesn’t appear to be any reasoning as to when it plays such as if I had discovered something or solved a puzzle. No, it just plays when ever the mood strikes it.

The programmer apparently used some type of adventure game creation software, so I will give him the benefit of the doubt and blame the engine on the various short comings. Regardless of where the fault lies, The Twilight Zone is simply uninspired and boring.

You can play the game and see the graphics as well if you run the TZVGA.bat file. The graphics are nice and that's why the reviews decided to change his vote for the game. Otherwise the review still applies (the graphics are just an adition to the game and aren't really needed at all).